On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 03:47:41PM -0400, William Coulter wrote:
> That is the next big question. I don't know, but we have to have some
> organization that can fight this kind of stuff.
>
> William
>
> On 4/18/07, Chad Perrin <perrin@apotheon.com> wrote:
> >
> >I wish I could say I was surprised at this behavior from Microsoft
> >lobbyists. I guess the next question is this: What can we do about it?
> >
Bruce Perens started OpenSourceParking.com as a way to fund open source
lobbying on a national level. That might be a good place to start. It
seems to me that state-level lobbying might be important as well.
On the other hand, I fear for what open source software lobbies might
turn into, in political terms. For instance, I seem to recall that
Bruce Perens is very much a Free Software kind of guy (in the FSF sense
of the term), and it would not be difficult to imagine his proposed
lobby turning into a vehicle for pressing FSF-sanctioned ideas at the
expense of other open source licenses and the communities built around
the software distributed under those licenses. In fact, it could even
lead to harm done to the communities surrounding software distributed
under the GPL. One nightmare future might involve an FSF-friendly lobby
funding legislation that would force the Linux kernel to upgrade to some
kind of GPL v4 in several years, based on the fact that the "real" GPL
includes a clause that suggests "upgrades" to later versions should be
made automatically.
It's a tough one. On one hand, it's difficult to fight the lobbyists on
their own turf without getting as dirty as them, and on the other, it's
difficult to fight them without stepping onto their turf because that
"turf" is almost all there is.
-- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please forward this to 20 others and erase your system partition.
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